A little over a year after Portugal. The Man released its eighth studio album and almost by accident ended up with a hit single and a Grammy for the song “Feel It Still,” the indie rock band is still figuring out what it means to become an overnight success after 14 years of making music in the studio and on the road.

You got a sense of how weird it must be a little before the halfway mark of the band’s terrific show at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles on Friday when a sardonic and self-deprecating slogan popped on screen behind the band promising, “Don’t worry, we’re playing ‘that song’ right after this.”

And you get in conversation with band members such as keyboard player Kyle O’Quin and guitarist Eric Howk before the show when they sat down in a dressing room backstage at the Shrine to talk about that song, “Feel It Still,” how it’s changed things for the group, and other topics from delivering one of the best sets at Coachella this year to using this newly expanded platform for social activism.

“I think all of our expectations have been surpassed,” O’Quin said. “We were just trying to make a good record and write good songs. We weren’t trying to write a song that did this.

“I think that’s partly why it happened, because we weren’t trying (to write a hit),” he said. “It came together in two hours.”

Portugal. The Man was on tour in Kansas City when the album dropped, Howk said, and there wasn’t any celebration. It felt good, of course, to have an album they band believed in to follow its strong predecessor, “Evil Friends.” But crossing over from the alternative and adult alternative charts, both of which “Feel It Still” topped, to the Top 40? Never really considered that, Howk said.

“This crossover (stuff) doesn’t happen for pretty much anyone,” he said. “And the a couple of months later we’re fighting Selena Gomez, Ariana Grande, for the No.1 spot. It was crazy.”

The song ultimately peaked at No. 4, but its catchy melody and sing-along lyrics made it a total earworm for much of the last year, and you could see the excitement its opening notes delivered at the Shrine.

In many ways, Portugal. The Man is still the same slightly off-kilter collective it’s always been, opening its shows with covers instead of original songs, stuff like Metallica or Pink Floyd, before seamlessly seguing into its own terrific tunes. At the Shrine on Friday where the band played an hour and 40 minutes compared to the hour it had at Coachella, that meant Floyd’s “Another Brick In The Wall, Part II” led to the band’s own “Purple Yellow Red and Blue,” and soon after the PTM song “Creep In a T-Shirt” flowed into T Rex’s “Children Of The Revolution,” all of this making perfect sense to band and audience alike.

“We’re big fans of other people’s music and we like to pay tribute to it,” O’Quin said earlier in the day.

“If we can open with Metallica and get to Ghostface Killah in eight steps” – which the band did Friday, moving from “For Whom The Bell Tolls” to ” A Kilo” during the set – that’s just making everybody’s night,” Howk said.

Other highlights of the show included songs such as “Modern Jesus,” “So American” and “Holy Roller,” those like many in the set proof that “Feel It Still” is definitely the norm when it comes to crafting catchy tunes that rock, something the six members of Portugal. The Man and its backing vocalists and strings and horn players do with authenticity in its proudly computer-and-backing-track-free performances, honed by touring 10 months out of most years, O’Quin said..

“I think that with our live show, to have those really, really human elements, even if there are mistakes, I think that’s super magical,” he said.

The slogans flashed on screen were a hit at Coachella, filling the role of the typical stage banter that none of the five men and one woman in PTM enjoy, and the humor they offer makes the crowd smile, Howk and O’Quin said. That’s especially the case when there’s a zinger in the bunch, such as at Lollapalooza recently where the band preceded Jack White to the stage and so popped up the message, “Are you ready for the old guy who used to play in the White Stripes?”

And the platform that a hit single provides has also allowed the band to reach out to fans with more of the social activism it’s always espoused, such as presentations by local Native Americans from each city in which the band plays to open each show. In Los Angeles, that involved a welcome song sung by one such leader, but it’s something that the band, many of whom grew up in communities with large native populations, feels is a simple thing it can do to raise awareness and maybe educate themselves and fans a little too.

“Essentially you reach out to aboriginal people from that part of the country and you invite them out to acknowledge that you’re on borrowed land – ‘borrowed’ – and it’s sort of just a blessing and recognizing that this land was once someone else’s,” Howk said of the practice which started earlier this year on tour in Australia.

Opening the show was Cuco, a 20-year-old singer from Hawthorne, who’s rapidly winning a large following for laid-back electronic romanticism. Backed by his six-piece band, Cuco had fans screaming for him like few opening acts you see, with some, such as the four teen girls wearing identical Cuco T-shirts in the row behind me, singing along to songs such as “Lo Que Siento” and “Summertime Hightime,” and then leaving, fully satisfied without sticking around for the headliners.

Peter Larsen has been the Pop Culture Reporter for the Orange County Register since 2004, finally achieving the neat trick of getting paid to report and write about the stuff he's obsessed about pretty much all his life. He regularly covers the Oscars and the Emmys, goes to Comic-Con and Coachella, reviews pop music, and conducts interviews with authors and actors, musicians and directors, a little of this and a whole lot of that. He grew up, in order, in California, Arkansas, Kentucky and Oregon. Graduated from Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Ore. with degrees in English and Communications. Earned a master's degree at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Earned his first newspaper paycheck at the Belleville (Ill.) News-Democrat, fled the Midwest for Los Angeles Daily News and finally ended up at the Orange County Register. He's taught one or two classes a semester in the journalism and mass communications department at Cal State Long Beach since 2006. Somehow managed to get a lovely lady to marry him, and with her have two daughters. And a dog named Buddy. Never forget the dog.